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MicroStrategy is sucking most of the air out of the room at the moment. But there are larger forces at play.

As debate rages over whether Saylor is a once-in-a-lifetime financial genius or just another debt-ridden trader, stablecoins are bringing more liquidity to cryptocurrencies.

At least, that is in relation to the raw dollar value being pumped into the space right now.

MSTR has now spent $17.5 billion on Bitcoin in the past two months alone, as shown in the orange areas on the chart below. Most of that money came from buyers of its notorious zero percent convertible bonds.

MicroStrategy purchases can then be viewed simply as accepting dollars with one hand and converting them into bitcoin with the other. Fast and cheap liquidity for exposure.

In the same period, US Bitcoin ETFs gained an additional $16.5 billion in net inflows. Otherwise, ETH ETFs added a net $3 billion, and together these flows are shown in blue on the chart.

ETFs follow the same process as MicroStrategy but without the bonds. They take the investor's money to buy an equivalent amount of bitcoin or ether, and pass the exposure to shareholders minus fees.

Then there are stablecoins. Since mid-October, stablecoin issuers have collectively issued $30.8 billion worth of additional tokens. More than 92% of these flows went into USDT and USDC.

Outside of Sky's USDS and the more exotic alternatives that have emerged, such as Ethena's USDe and Usual USD0Stablecoin managers typically take US dollars, buy short-term Treasuries and cash equivalents, and then issue the same amount of new token supply to those around them in cash.

Obviously, stablecoin flows are not actually the same as ETF flows or the MSTR cash pipeline.

But they represent something similar: a widespread desire to enter cryptocurrency markets via many avenues.

This now amounts to nearly $68 billion in the past nine weeks – easily the largest liquidity wave ever, at least by my estimates.

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